Trump dismisses AI existential threat warnings amid tech lab concerns

U.S. President Donald Trump has dismissed warnings that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, after a wave of insiders at frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI stepped up public warnings of risks from the technology.

When asked if he had concerns about AI leading to human extinction, Trump said, "No, I don't have any."

"I have concerns that if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position," the president told reporters Thursday. "We are leading China right now by a pretty good period, I would say a year, which is, you know, considered a lot."

The U.S. and China are locked in a battle for AI supremacy, with tensions ratcheting up as Chinese AI models have become more advanced and their adoption grows across the globe.

Trump's comments came after a number of researchers at frontier AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, sounded the alarm over the rapid pace of development of the tech.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said Tuesday that he was quitting the company over concerns that Anthropic and rival OpenAI are "gambling with our lives."

He added that those building AI believed that it could "kill us all by the end of the decade" — a view which has since been echoed by other employees at the labs.

Many AI safety fears revolve around models developing the ability to improve their own performance, a technique known as recursive self-improvement, or RSI.

"It's hard to overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is," said Jasmine Wang, an OpenAI researcher working on alignment, on Wednesday evening.

OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said Saturday that he has a "strong expectation" that the speed of progress in AI could be sustained into recursive self-improvement. "I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence."

Trump's comments come as some Republican lawmakers have joined Democrats in backing greater oversight of advanced AI systems.

In July, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., announced plans to introduce a bill called the FRONTIER Act, which aims to establish a framework for governing the deployment of advanced AI models.

"Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway," Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. "It's past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job."

Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced a bill called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily pause advanced AI development until the federal government establishes safety rules.